Friday, July 14, 2006

Reasons to read "Manhunter" #12

In issue #12, Kate discovers that Dylan's barn, where he keeps his tech stuff, is larger on the inside than on the outside due to some tesseract tech, procured from Warp, whom Dylan used to work for.

If you're like me at all, you can't help but think about some of the ramifications of stuff in the DCU, particularly all the super-tech they have lying around. I mean, the JLA has teleporters. TEL E PORT ERS. Even if, for some reasons those can't be shared or duplicated easily for regular folk, the knowledge that teleportation is possible would lead (in our world) to furious investment and research until it became feasible and profitable.

Only occasionally do we see such matters explored in the DCU. That makes sense, because if you start to follow through on things like that, and the world the characters live in becomes too unrecognizable for us to relate to it. It's okay if some superheroes teleport on occasion, as long as schoolteachers aren't all teleporting to class every day. I don't really want to read about a world where heroes and villains are upstaged by their props.

But Manhunter's a place where you get to see some of those ideas come into play. It's, well, sort of a lint trap for the DCU; weapon, villains, concepts, characters that have shaken out from stories elsewhere are finding a home there, and a world is being built around them.

Sure, it's not the kind of "essential" reading that something like Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman is supposed to be. But it's a clever "literary orphanage" that feels more and more like a home as you read it, and helps the whole DCU feel like a "real" place, a place that you're comfortable in and that makes sense to you.

The technophile aspect of Manhunter is just another reason I'd love to see interaction with Jack Knight, even if just in passing, and hopefully the recent familiar revelation will lead to that. Ted Knight's asseriton that everything that happens in the DCU can somehow be explained by technology seems to be supported by the lint that Manhunter digs into, and I'd be neat to see what Jack thinks of all this.

I'm more and more convinced that Marc Andreyko could pull off another Starman-type epic, though Manhunter may be to engrained in DCU crossoverness to be that. I'll be curious to see what he comes up with after the inevitable cancellation.